The invention relates generally to microgrids and more particularly to a predictive control strategy for management and control of microgrids having arbitrary numbers of assets and arbitrary system topologies.
A microgrid is defined generally as an aggregation of controllable and uncontrollable asserts which may comprise, for example, electrical generators, loads, and storage devices. Electrical generators in a microgrid typically include, for example, non-conventional energy sources such as micro turbines, wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, fuel cells, or hydrogen fed reciprocating engines. Microgrids may supply power, for example, to shopping centers, industrial parks, college campuses or villages.
Economic Dispatch is the process of allocating the required load demand between the available conventional generation units to minimize the cost of operation, primarily fuel cost. Many conventional algorithmic approaches have been proposed to implement Economic Dispatch. These include, for example: Merit Order Loading, Range Elimination, Binary Section, Secant Section, Graphical/Table Look-Up, Convex Simplex, Dantzig-Wolf Decomposition, Separable Convex Linear Programming, Reduced Gradient with Linear Constraints, Steepest Descent Gradient, First Order Gradient, Merit Order Reduced Gradient, etc. These algorithms are well documented in the literature.
The conventional electric power system representation for Economic Dispatch consists of models for the generating units. The generation model represents the cost of producing electricity as a function of power generated and the generation capability of each unit.Conventional unit cost function: minΣFi(Pi)  (1)                wherein Fi=production cost, Pi=production power        Unit capacity limits:Pi,min<=Pi<=Pi,max  (2)        System constraints (demand−supply balance)ΣPi=ΣDi  (3)        
The conventional unit cost function does not include fuel cost, operational cost, unit degradation, and penalties such as emission, among other things.
It would be both advantageous and beneficial to provide an advanced dispatch control method that solves power system dispatch problems by integrating a larger variety of generation, load and storage assets, including, but not limited to, combined heat and power (CHP) units, renewable generation with forecasting, controllable loads, electric, thermal and water energy storage. It would be further advantageous if the advance dispatch control method were capable of dynamically scheduling the different assets in order to achieve global optimization and maintain the system normal operation.